As rumoured about for weeks now, with the strongest rumours appearing a few days ago, AMD has bought ATI. "AMD, the world's second-biggest semiconductor maker, agreed to buy ATI for USD 5.4 billion, adding computer-graphics chips to its product lineup. ATI shares surged. AMD Chief Executive Officer Hector Ruiz is making the biggest purchase in the company's history to help escalate his challenge to Intel, which dominates the market for semiconductors. "

This merger may in the (distant) future produce benefits for GPU-based proccessing offloading. If the GPU and the CPU are manufactured by the same company, there may be a trend to converge the technologies, pushing the GPU towards more generic processing to relieve the CPU. I'm aware this is already happenning in some ways, I mean hat this may be even more of an incentive for this path.